This week’s blog is written by Lisa Randisi. Visitor Services Assistant at UCL Culture.

In my first month at the Grant Museum I learned that I, like many before me, had made a mistake. A rather… colossal mistake. Under a large glass bell near the flying lemur (which is neither a lemur nor can fly, but that’s a story for another time) lies a specimen that, for sheer size and improbability, I’d always assumed to be a fake. A plastic replica made for teaching, perhaps. Little did I know that I was actually looking at a real…

African bush elephant heart, LDUCZ-Z639

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Fluid preserved specimens newly conserved

Over the past year, UCL Museums’ conservation team have been focussing our efforts on the the specimens preserved in fluid at the Grant Museum. We’re calling it Project Pickle*.

Before we could start conserving the objects we had to establish the scale of the task, so we could decide how to plan the work. We went through the entire fluid specimen store, surveying a whopping 3,787 specimens to determine what treatments each of them needed.

This initial phase took many months to complete and involved the help of student volunteers and a student placement. The result of that survey means that we can now quantify how many specimens are in good, fair, poor or unacceptable condition with the aim to prioritize conserving the specimens in the worst condition.  So why do fluid preserved specimens need conservation and how do they get to be in an ‘unacceptable condition?’

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Hello! Will Richard here. Turning my mind (and now yours) to specimen of the week once again. And it’s back to the world of invertebrates, but certainly not microscopic ones. In fact, this invertebrate is bigger than most animals full of backbone. If we use the “Richard theoretical comparison of interspecies violence” (RTCIV) (something which I’m hoping will soon be adopted by the wider scientific community) I’m not sure I could beat it in a fight. This week’s specimen is…

LDUCZ-H272 Coconut crab (Birgus latro)

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